Germany | Catalonia

A key result of the German elections is not that Angela Merkel and her double party, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Bavarian CSU (Christian Social Union), managed to stay in the lead with the most votes, but that they got clobbered, with the biggest loss since their founding.
A second key result is that the Social Democrats (SPD) got clobbered too, also with the worst results since the war. And since these three had been wedded in a coalition government for the past four years, their clobbering showed that many voters were not the happy, satisfied citizens often pictured by You-never-had-it-so-good-Merkel, but are worried, disturbed and angry. So angry that they rejected the leading parties of the Establishment, those representing and defending the status quo.
A third key story, the truly alarming one, is that one eighth of the voters, almost 13 percent, vented their anger in an extremely dangerous direction – for the young Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose leaders are loosely divided between far right racists and extreme right racists. With about 80 loud deputies in the new Bundestag – their first breakthrough nationally – the media must now give them far more space than before to spout their poisonous message (and most media have been more than generous with them up till now).
This danger is worst in Saxony, the strongest East German state, ruled since unification by a conservative CDU. The AfD has pushed into first place with 27 %, narrowly beating the CDU by a tenth of a percentage point, their first such victory in any state (the Left got 16.1, the SPD only 10.5 % in Saxony).

Democracy has been under a lot of pressure in Catalonia for the past few weeks. European values, civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of information and freedom of assembly are being violated by Spain’s central government, which has sent the police to search newspapers, printing companies and private mail services; ban political meetings; seize referendum material; and threaten to imprison democratically elected politicians.
On Wednesday, this moved up a gear, when threats became reality and Spanish paramilitary police took Catalonia to a de facto state of emergency. Fourteen high-ranking government officials were arrested as part of the anti-referendum operation, as police raided government buildings, offices and private homes. Catalan home rule has effectively been suspended due to this anti-democratic attitude from the Spanish government. It’s a situation that harks back to the dark past of this country, when democracy was not a part of the Spanish dictionary. What is happening here in Catalonia would not happen anywhere else in the European Union.

Spain’s attorney general has refused to rule out the possibility of arresting the Catalan president, as the region’s pro-sovereignty government prepares to defy Madrid by holding an independence referendum on Sunday.
José Manuel Maza said that Carles Puigdemont could face action for disobedience, breaching public duties and misuse of public funds for proceeding with the poll after Spain’s constitutional court suspended the hastily passed legislation underpinning the vote.
Maza said the regional president could be arrested for misuse of public funds as the crime carries a jail sentence. On Monday, he told Onda Cero radio that although such a move had not been judged “timely” as yet, adding: “It’s a decision that’s always available.”
Speaking days after Spanish police arrested 14 Catalan officials, seized almost 10m ballot papers and chartered ferries to accommodate the thousands of extra police officers who are being sent to Catalonia to stop the referendum, Maza rejected suggestions that the government was being heavy-handed.

After its improper, evasive, even complicit responses to Charlottesville, to Trump and to Hungary’s anti-Semitic anti-Soros campaign, it’s no surprise that Israel’s response to neo-Nazis in the Bundestag is a deafening silence…
Not that Netanyahu or other fighters for the Jewish cause miss a chance to smell what seems to them to be an anti-Semitic rat: When the German foreign minister visited Israel and met representatives of the Breaking the Silence NGO, he and his Social Democratic party were accused of being anti-Semitic.
When the Mayor of Berlin (also a Social Democrat) was not quick enough in condemning the BDS movement he was even threatened by the Wiesenthal Center to be put on the list of top ten anti-Semites worldwide.
In short, anti-Semitism is attributed primarily to those who do not support the Israeli government’s policy…
In a few weeks another right-wing populist party, the Austrian one, will be on the verge of entering the government. Is Israel going to disregard the racist character of this party too, and tolerate its entry into the government only because its leader declared his sympathy for Israel’s policies?

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Beijing International Peace Vigil was started in March 2003 by a group of foreigners living in Beijing, China who want to work together to build lasting peace, security and justice for everyone throughout the world. Our motivation to form the group was our shared opposition to the US-initiated war on Iraq.
However, our commitment goes beyond opposing war to the need for everyone to build a better world. We believe that one important way to build peace and justice is to defend and strengthen existing global institutions, especially the UN family, as well as to build new institutions, both formal and informal.
A second essential way is to work for an alternative internationalist form of globalization as opposed to today’s corporate version.
The group meets every week to discuss related issues and from time to time invites guest speakers to address the group. The group is devising its own ideas on United Nations reform, a Millennium Goal for Peace and an alternative form of globalization. It seeks to link up with others thinking along similar lines to encourage debate of these issues and help create a force for change to which governments will have to listen.
As one of our members said, there is a second superpower in the world: it is the voices and action of the peoples throughout the world working together for peace and justice.